Trying to contact company A about making an order. They do not answer their phones. They will not respond to voice mail messages. They do not respond to email.
Trying to contact company B about a in-warranty return. The website customer service "contact us" form, when submitted, the submit button turns light gray and nothing happens. This occurs in both Firefox on Linux and Chrome on Windows. No posted phone number.
Beginning to develop something like "Dead Internet Theory", but for capitalism
Part of the reason Open Source eclipsed Free Software was that it actually delivered on the promise. Open Source aimed squarely at corporate buyers. They didn't hear open[ly available] source [code], they heard open [to competitive tender second] source. And that's a great economic argument for a company that uses a load of software. Companies love having second sources, because two competing vendors are less likely to lock you in and price gouge. An open field of an unbounded number of second sources makes accountants very happy.
Free Software, in contrast, promised user empowerment. It came with a set of freedoms and the guaranteed rights to make the software do what you wanted. You, the end user, weren't to be constrained by the set of things that a vendor decided your computer should do. It could do whatever you wanted, you could build on the work of others to do it, and you could subsequently share your work to further empower other people.
And almost no F/OSS delivers on that promise. I have a PhD in computer science. I'm on the C++ standards committee. I have written code in OS kernels, compilers, and some of the lowest-level bits of modern systems. I've also written bits of a GUI toolkit, text layout engines, and other bits up and down the stack, even the occasional bit of JavaScript for the web. And yet, to me, most F/OSS applications are simply black boxes. If they don't do what I want, I have no more chance of modifying them than I do MS Office or macOS (actually less, because both of those have rich scripting environments). The only benefit I have is that it didn't cost anything, but my time is valuable and I'd happily pay a little bit for something that was a closer approximation of what I want from a computer.
Imagine how it looks to someone who doesn't program for fun.
And what does the FSF do to address this? It gives the world a more complex software license. Because surely that will be the thing that finally makes all software empower users! The fact that now exercising the four freedoms with their software comes with more legal risks will obviously make more people realise the benefits of them!
People who are serious about Free Software should look back to Smalltalk and Lisp systems, where every part of the system was introspectable and mutable. They should look at the amazing research in the last couple of decades on approachable end-user programming languages. They should abandon siloed app abstractions that exist to keep people locked into single-vendor ecosystems and build small, modular, reusable, components. Computers could be so much better than they are, and Free Software could enable system designs that are impossible with a COTS proprietary model.
EDIT: To be completely clear: I am 100% on the Free Software side of this. I want computers to empower users and I want to remove obstacles to this. I just think that almost everything the FSF has done since the publication of the first version of the GPL has been a hinderance to that agenda.
UPDATE: I haven't seen Recall in action there. I was just asking the doctor how they'll deal with it.
This morning, I went to the doctor for a scheduled appointment. While she was looking at the results of blood tests from two years ago on the screen (and suggested repeating them for a follow-up), I realized she was using Windows 11. A detail came to mind. The doctor is extremely polite and friendly, so I asked her, "How do you handle the feature called Recall?" The doctor was taken aback and had no idea what I was talking about. I was about to drop the conversation, but she, being a serious professional, immediately called the technicians who manage their PCs to ask for clarification. They downplayed it, saying it's not an issue and that it's a feature "on all PCs, so we can't do anything about it." She started to express that she didn’t like it and wanted it deactivated. No luck: they won’t proceed because, according to them, even deactivating it is "a hack that could compromise future updates." She’s furious and will talk to her colleagues and the decision-makers. She wants secure systems because "there’s patient data involved."
In reality, patient data is stored on servers (which I haven't investigated), but everything that appears on the screen is, in my opinion, at risk.
I’ve offered to help them find a solution—because, if I'm right, all they need is LibreOffice and a browser. In that case, I’ll suggest one of the *BSD or Linux systems and do it for free.
I don’t want to make money off my doctor. I just want patient data to be (sufficiently) secure.
#IT #Recall #Windows #OwnYourData #Security #Privacy #RunBSD #Linux
I guess the takeaway from the xz backdoor situation is:
If you’re an open-source project maintainer, and somebody starts getting on your case for not doing enough free work for them, you reply “big Jia Tan energy there” and then block them forever.
Censorship
Now, another genocide is under way in Gaza, and censorship is once again playing its part. In the era of camera phones and social media sites, it proved somewhat impossible for those committing and facilitating genocide to stop Palestinians from sharing their reality, and those around the world from raising their voices to support them.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/3/20/censorship-is-a-crucial-complement-of-genocide
Planning on moving from #Unity to #godotengine? Last year I wrote a guide "From Unity to Godot: Game Objects and Components in Godot?"
mcc
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
Stefano Marinelli
Andrew Plotkin
lizzy 
earthling
mia
[GRLC] DOL-001
Taylor Lorenz
Alfred R. Baudisch